New Reaper of Souls Beta Path and D3 PTR Patch Now Live

Posted By: February 7, 2014

The New Reaper of Souls Beta Patch and D3 PTR Patch is now live and available on the test realm. It’s got a ton of impactful changes to almost every aspect of the game, including monsters, skills, legendary items, general difficulty, and much more. Here’s a very short summation of some of the bigger shifts I noticed in my quick over:

Tons of skills changes, almost all of them shifting elemental damage types.

General difficulty easing in all difficulties up through Torment 1.

Big changes to the rewards from Bounties and Nephalem Rifts.

Nerfs to a lot of bosses, including easier elemental affixes and the removal of many enrage timers.

Major revisions to crafting, including shifted material costs, increased numbers of blue/white materials from salvaging, and general balance revision.

Dozens of legendary and set items got new/different bonus properties.

Treasure Goblins have been made more rewarding.

And more. Much MOAR.

Here’s a quote from a part near the end, with the big changes to Bounties and Nephalem Rifts in Reaper of Souls.

ADVENTURE MODE

Bounties

Horadric Caches no longer drop Rift Keystones

Rift Keystones are now Rift Keystone Fragments

A player may use 5 Rift Fragments to summon a Nephalem Rift

Horadric Caches now drop 2 Rift Fragments

Bounties now grant Rift Fragments

The first bounty completed in any Act will no longer reward Rift Fragments or Blood Shards

Bounties have had their Blood Shard awards adjusted

Normal Bounties grant 1 Blood Shard

Expert and Bonus Bounties grant 2 Blood Shards

Master and above Bounties grant 4 Blood Shards

Bounty Scrolls have been re-tuned.

There are now five types of Bounty Scroll buffs

Damage bonuses for Bounty Scrolls have been reduced from 300% to 25%

Players will now only earn rewards from bounties if they are in the same zone as the bounty when it is completed

The experience and gold rewards now varies depending on the type of bounty completed

The reward of each bounty should now be more proportional to the time and effort required to complete the bounty

Nephalem Rifts

Rift bosses now have a chance to drop a Fiery Brimstone from levels 1-60

Treasure Goblin packs are now more rare

Numerous Rift bosses have received damage and health tuning passes

Click through for the huge patch notes, because infos.

GENERAL

Expert, Master, and Torment I difficulty levels have all been made slightly easier

Torment II, III, IV, and V have picked up the slack so that Torment VI stays roughly the same

The Paragon levelling curve has been adjusted to better match XP gain rates at max level

Players who had relatively high Paragon levels (250+) should find their rate of levelling significantly faster

Player hit boxes have been adjusted to more closely represent character models

Both male and female models of the same class share the same hit box size

Bug Fix: The Legendary Star indicator on the mini map should now properly show up when a Legendary or Set Item drops

BOSSES

The following bosses no longer have enrage timers except in Torment difficulty and above

Which organs drop from bosses is now dependent on which Infernal Machine was used to open the portal

If a player uses a level 60 Infernal Machine, the boss will drop the level 60 organs

Old reagents now drop from bosses from levels 60-70

This is to prevent situations where players could obtain the new organs using old Infernal Machines; this also allows players at level 70 the option to farm for and craft the level 60 Hellfire Ring if they wish

No, they don’t, which sucks. However, if you specialize on certain types of elemental damage you’ll still get themed and varied builds because of course the skill runes differ in what they do. For example, if you specialize on poison damage and use poison runes you’ll be more DoT oriented, since poison effects usually work that way.

To clarify my post somewhat, my main point is that elemental damage types may not have innate effects, but there’s still a very real difference between a Fire Wizard and a Cold Wizard. Not only because they will probably use different skills, but because even if they use the same ones they’ll be using different runes, giving them different strength and weaknesses.

There is. Mostly what this does is nerfs elemental damage affixes as before you had a lot of abilities that were the same element, and now that different skills are different elements (and enemies still have almost no resists/immunities) you always want to pick an element and then spam it as elemental bonuses are replacing ias in the holy trifecta.

Overall, these changes are looking really good. I’m pretty excited to play ROS now, and I have 100% faith that they will deliver a very fun experience. Although I’m still not sure that ROS will have the longevity players want from a Diablo game.

For me personally, I can see 3-4 months having a blast gearing the different classes. Pretty excited for march ^_^

I know you realized your mistake, but I’d still like to mention that according to the CMs until about level 80 we won’t see huge improvements. Leveling speed will increase from that point on however, so if someone for example was sitting at level 200 after importing their account and they re-import it after this patch they should be at a higher level.

Now I understand. Because they messed with the xp curve. Low levels lost effective Paragons and high levels gained effective Paragons. Around 190 is the spot where you didnt see any immediate change in level.

Speed for new PTR/ROS XP is much higher so ultimately, everyone will go much faster. To me this is a ‘everybody wins’ scenario, though some P1000s feel it devalues their time investment understandably. BUT they’ll start with 340ish sharagon instead of 307. Calculators must be updated. P800 is much more possible than before with the new curve.

Reason I didnt see changes to my main account is that Im around 3 P100s, sharagon 190, which is near the spot in the curve where you neither gained or lost effective levels. My wife, though, lost half her sharagon.

Encounter has been greatly revised, resulting in a much greater challenge
All additional bosses summoned during the fight must be defeated to complete the event
Be warned! This battle is not for the faint of heart!

Riftstone fragments opens up so much possibilities for special rifts. They only need to put special fragments into the mix en we could have riftskeys with special properties.
example:
3 normal rift fragments + riftfragment of cold + champion riftfragment = champion riftkey of cold. This riftkey would have more champion packs en all monsters deal extra cold dmg!

“Players should now encounter smaller packs of monsters less frequently”.

Does it mean “it is less likely to encounter smaller (smallest?) packs” (hence more monsters) or “pack will be smaller and monster packs are less frequent”. I understand the second but I prefer an answer from a native (or from in game testing).

Horadric Caches no longer drop Rift Keystones
Rift Keystones are now Rift Keystone Fragments
A player may use 5 Rift Fragments to summon a Nephalem Rift
Horadric Caches now drop 2 Rift Fragments
Bounties now grant Rift Fragments
The first bounty completed in any Act will no longer reward Rift Fragments or Blood Shards

Can someone one explain this? I mean, why not simple change to 5 rift keystone to summon a nephalem rift?

Well, one key is usually enough to open something, so it wouldn’t have been very logical to require 5 keystone for rifts. It was probably a simple change anyway, they just renamed keystones to fragments.

Seriously? Talking about logic in a Diablo game? Also your logic doesnt make sense since infernal machine takes 3 keys to create one.
It just useless time that the D3 team spend that in the end just accomplish nothing.

Keep Depths 2, Cursed Chest event – I noticed increased monster number, though I never did it on Torment before, so can’t tell for sure. No more small spiders, so I didn’t made it.

Clan is unavailable, same thing happened to DFans community, our (Diablo IncGamers) community is available (I can join chat). And that’s big (huge? enormous?) problem, makes playing less funny.
Or maybe you banned me? No, you wouldn’t do that 🙂 But, let me think… HEY! 😀

Not necessarily, it’s just one way to build your gear. The old trifecta stats are still pretty good, although you have to sacrifice more defense than you had to in past if you go that way. On the other hand they don’t soft-lock you into specific skills and runes. I’d imagine some people will prefer them because of that.

“this just gives more combinations that do so.”

But that’s the whole point, this way elemental boost doesn’t become a global boost (like the main attributes) to all skills. They are pretty pointless if the classes don’t have skills with varied elemental types.

That’s just it, they’ll be a global boost regardless, the only question is if there’s one or many builds that do so. If you don’t want specific boosts being global boosts, but bigger, then you make enemies have elemental resistances. That way going mono element actually has drawbacks. And THEN you give all classes a variety of elements, so they can balance diversity vs power.

There’s nothing wrong with going the elemental resistance route. From my point of view that solution simply places the drawbacks elsewhere. That way you lose effectiveness against specific enemies, but retain skill choices.

The current system is the opposite of that. You lose skill choices by going specializing on an element, but you can still run all areas of the game effectively.

Which is more preferable is largely subjective, although I happen to like the latter option more, as I think it gives more control to the players. In Rifts you could encounter resistances completely randomly, so you would never know when you’ll get screwed over by RNGesus. With the current system however when you go elemental you always know what you’re getting into, so it’s an informed choice.

If the devs would want to reduce the effectiveness of builds through monster stats I would much rather see them do it by their density. Each area in the game should have different enemy population. This way AoE builds could be more effective in the Weeping Hollow for example, and single target build in Act 4. Ideally drop rates should be time normalized however. The reason I’d prefer this solution is because I think it’s a much more interesting challenge to improve our efficiency this way in an area. With resistance it’s always obvious what the right choice is.

There’s nothing wrong with going the elemental resistance route. From my point of view that solution simply places the drawbacks elsewhere. That way you lose effectiveness against specific enemies, but retain skill choices.

It means you can go “Ancient Tunnels”, focus on one element and have a lot of raw power, but can’t farm effectively in areas where things resist that element. Or you go a more general purpose approach and can play in more areas, but not as quickly. Basically D2, without being forced into a mono element build, and without outright immunities so you COULD still stuff in off areas, it’s just not at all efficient.

Only for Set items. Currently they require the 4th level of Imperial gems (can’t remember the name) per item. It’s not the item itself that costs that much, it’s the gems.

“3M for enchanting legendaries?”

Enchanting costs have actually been significantly reduced from what I’ve heard and Flux told me that the main bottleneck is getting enough Forgotten Souls if you want to enchant Legendaries. Since the gold price goes up with every enchant however rerolling can get really pricey after a while.

“If so, sucks if you are not super wealthy!”

You are looking at only one half of the equation. Costs doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how much gold you can get in a given time. From what I’ve heard it’s not that hard to get 2-3 millions of gold in a few hours if you have access to Adventure mode. I’d say Sets are really pricey, but you should keep in mind two things:

1) The goal is that Sets should have the most game changing bonuses.
2) Everything can still change and it’s not hard or time consuming to adjust item prices if they are deemed too high during testing.